Céline Dion is au courant

BRENDAN KELLY, The Gazette10.31.2013

Céline Dion performs at Pandora Presents Céline Dion at the Edison Ballroom on Tuesday in New York City. The singer has moved away from her trademark big ballads on her new album, which Billboard magazine has called “dubstep lite.”Larry Busacca
/ Getty Images for Columbia Record

Céline Dion performs at Pandora Presents Céline Dion at the Edison Ballroom on Tuesday in New York City. The singer has moved away from her trademark big ballads on her new album, which Billboard magazine has called “dubstep lite.”Larry Busacca
/ Getty Images for Columbia Record

Celine Dion (left) and Rene Angelil (right) pose with Governor General David Johnston in Quebec City on Friday July 26, 2013. Angelil was name a Member of the Order of Canada, while Dion was elevated to the rank of Companion.Jacques Boissinot
/ Canadian Press

Celine Dion performs during the benefit concert for the family of Denis Blanchette at the Metropolis in Montreal on Monday, October 1, 2012. Blanchette, a lighting technician, was shot and killed at the Parti Quebecois victory gathering on the night of the September 4 Quebec provincial election.Pierre Obendrauf
/ Gazette file photo

Related

March 30, 1968: Born in Charlemagne 1981: René Angélil remortgages his home to help finance Dion’s first album

On the phone recently with Céline Dion, I told her that, listening to her new album, Loved Me Back To Life, I really had the impression that she was doing her best to make the music sound as up-to-date as possible.

On some songs it doesn’t even sound like Céline Dion, I added.

The Québécois superstar didn’t miss a beat down the line from a hotel near her Florida home.

“Is that a bad thing?” asked the new, more assertive Dion, who never would have challenged a journalist like that back when she was first beginning her English career.

No, not at all, I said; au contraire, I find it interesting.

“Thank you,” Dion said. “Me too. First of all, the singer and the musicians, we’re here to serve the music the best we can. Every song demands a certain approach and different sounds.”

She talks of how she has used the same recipe for 30 years — a recipe that has worked only too well — but it has been six years since her last album in the language of Katy, and she and her handlers were well aware that much had changed on the pop landscape during that time. Even when Taking Chances dropped in ’07, the big ballads that had been Dion’s bread and butter in the ’90s and early ’00s were fading from commercial radio, and in 2013, they virtually no longer exist in the Top 40.

It’s all-Euro-dance, all-the-time, with a little hip hop thrown in for good measure. Suffice it to say that you don’t hear a ton of melodramatic, big-voiced tear-jerkers on either Virgin Radio 96 or The Beat. So Dion, husband/manager René Angélil and their advisers realized there was a real need for some serious musical retooling.

The result of that rethink, Loved Me Back To Life, is to be released Tuesday.

Just check out the leadoff single and title track. It has a hard driving beat, with prominent percussion, leading Billboard magazine to call it “dubstep lite.” The song is co-written by Sia, best-known for co-writing Rihanna’s smash hit Diamonds. OK, Loved Me Back To Life is still at the core of its beating heart a power ballad, but it’s wrapped in a sonic package that’s light years removed from My Heart Will Go On.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Dion said. “I didn’t ask Ne-Yo, can you write me a song? Can you sing with me? Hey Sia, by the way, wanna give me one? I didn’t do that. The people I work with told people in the industry I was about to record a new album and if they were interested, they could send songs. Then we started the process of listening to songs. I received a lot of songs and I’m very thankful, because I don’t write my own material. And I was ecstatic when I saw Sia wrote me a song.

“Even my son (René-Charles) said — ‘Sia? That can’t be true. Mom, she writes for Rihanna. She can’t write for you. That’s not possible.’ ”

For Dion, it was all about finding the right songs. Watching the electronic press kit for Loved Me Back To Life, you can see the pleasure Dion had making this collection. She’s belting out Incredible with R & B singer and songwriter Ne-Yo and is seen working intensely with British producer Eg White, who twirled the knobs for Adele, and with Oklahoma singer-songwriter Audra Mae, who penned two songs for the album.

“I know what I feel,” Dion said, of the arduous process of picking just the right tracks to relaunch herself in English. “It’s when it’s doing it, when it’s making me want to dance, to sing, and I can’t wait to go into a recording studio. I know I can do a job with that one and it suits me. And I feel like singing that repertoire now. So it talks to me. Then when I go into the recording studio, that song that spoke to me, it demands a certain approach.”

Dion talks of how they focused much more on “drying” the voice, and you can hear that toning down. There are almost none of the chest-thumping histrionics of The Power of Love or All By Myself. “If you dry your voice, there’s no reverb on it, and so when you keep the voice very dry, it pushes the voice forward and you can hear all the details of it, all the colours. So for me that’s a very different approach. And it suits these songs. I think it’s a modern sound and it suits me. They’re very powerful songs. I’m not here to reinvent myself. I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I’m not starting all over again. But even if I can’t reinvent myself, still what I’ve done is what I’ve done. So I have to come with something new.”

One of the highlights of the collection is her cover of Janis Ian’s 1975 Grammy-winning hit At Seventeen, a folky ballad that you could think of as a quiet meditative take on the same theme as Nirvana’s grunge classic Smells Like Teen Spirit. This song about teen angst, struck a chord with the singer.

“I grew up in this amazing family,” Dion recalled. “When I went to school, I had to wear my brothers’ jeans, my oldest sister’s jackets and the shoes of my cousin. We didn’t have money to have (fashionable clothes). It was a little intimidating for me. I was not feeling my best. I was very skinny. I had teeth problems. I wanted to stay home, to stay with the people who loved me so much for who I was. But I had to be in society. I had to go to school. So it’s not always easy. And what I went through is nothing compared to what a lot of kids have to go through today.”

But the 45-year-old woman singing At Seventeen has come so far from those awkward teen years — and not just in terms of fame and fortune. She’s a much more self-assured person, comfortable in her own skin, so different from the shy young woman I met more than 20 years ago just before the launch of her first English album.

It’s clear that being a mother is a big part of that transformation. Her twin boys just turned 3, and René-Charles is set to celebrate his 13th birthday in January, which has Dion marvelling at the concept that she will soon be mother to a teenage boy.

“We all have to do our best. It’s not written in a book and the parents have to follow the rules. We all have to do what we think is right for our own children. What’s right for me might not be right for you and vice versa. But it’s tough for kids today.”

Dion has tailored her concert schedule in Vegas to allow time for her family, and the planned sale of her pricey Florida compound is also designed to let the family spend more time in Vegas. She thinks that will be better for René-Charles, and interestingly enough, given what she said about her high-school days, they have decided to home-school their son.

“It started to be difficult for him. He’d start a project and then he’d never be able to finish it with the group (because they were travelling). He never feels he’s part of the group and that emotionally is not healthy at all. So we had to find a non-stress way of learning. So he can be emotionally balanced and be with the family.”

bkelly@montrealgazette.comtwitter: brendanshowbiz

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.